Industry increasingly depends upon highly automated data acquisition and control systems to ensure that industrial processes are run efficiently, safely, and reliably while lowering their overall production costs. Data acquisition begins when a number of sensors measure aspects of an industrial process and periodically report their measurements back to a data collection and control system. Such measurements come in a wide variety of forms. By way of example, the measurements produced by a sensor/recorder include: temperature, pressure, pH, and mass/volume flow of material, as well as a tallied inventory of packages waiting in a shipping line and/or a photograph of a room in a factory. Such process systems generate large and varied quantities of data which can put a great strain on communications networks during transmission to storage devices. Ensuring efficient, effective transmission of data is an important part of running an efficient process and reducing general bandwidth usage can result in lower costs and a smaller likelihood of valuable data being lost.